Often, surfaces of substrates do not include desired performance characteristics. The failure to include specific desired performance characteristics can result in surface degradation in certain environments, an inability to meet certain performance requirements, or combinations thereof. For example, in certain environments, metallic, glass, and ceramic surfaces can be subjected to wear and other undesirable surface activities such as chemical adsorption, catalytic activity, corrosive attack, oxidation, by-product accumulation or stiction, and/or other undesirable surface activities.
Undesirable surface activities can cause chemisorption of other molecules, reversible and irreversible physisorption of other molecules, catalytic reactivity with other molecules, attack from foreign species, a molecular breakdown of the surface, physical loss of substrate, or combinations thereof.
To provide certain desired performance characteristics, a silicon hydride surface and unsaturated hydrocarbon reagents can be reacted in the presence of a metal catalyst. Such processes suffer from the drawbacks that complete removal of this catalyst from the treated system is often difficult and the presence of the catalyst can re-introduce undesirable surface activity. Amorphous silicon-based chemical vapor deposition materials are also susceptible to dissolution by caustic high pH media, thereby limiting their use in such environments.
A coating may be applied to a surface to protect it from undesirable surface activities. One known method of depositing a coating on a surface is chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Generally, CVD deposits a solid material from a vapor under controlled atmospheric and temperature conditions for a predetermined time to form a coating. CVD can include a primary treatment followed by functionalization (a surface reaction) to add predetermined molecules.
However, despite the prior use of CVD generally, molecules, including silicon, carbon, and hydrogen, have previously been considered undesirable for use as CVD precursors or have been applied in conjunction with other CVD precursors in the presence of additional depositional energies, such as plasma and microwave fields. Thus, properties associated with such molecules have previously been unrealized through thermal CVD technology.
Such drawbacks have prevented applicability in certain fields, such as, semiconductor fabrication processes. Layers on surfaces that materials contact in the semiconductor fabrication processes can result in undesirable effects for the process, such as, metal ion contamination and corrosive attack of processing substrates.
Accordingly, a semiconductor fabrication process that does not suffer from one or more of the above drawbacks would be desired in the art.